Archive for the ‘Tucker Tiger Tank’ tag

After Kurt’s Cars of Futures Past story on the Tucker 48, we thought we’d take a look at another Tucker prototype that also ended up rather prescient in a few ways: the Tucker Tiger Tank, also known as the Tucker combat car.

Long before the Tucker 48, Preston Tucker had partnered with the legendary Harry A. Miller to apply his ideas on automobile engineering to Indianapolis race cars and through that venture established himself within the automotive community; so he was certainly no unknown factor when, shortly before the United States became involved in World War II, he approached the U.S. Army with his prototype for a high-speed all-terrain combat car. According to Charles T. Pearson’s The Indomitable Tin Goose, Tucker envisioned the combat car a couple of years prior while recuperating from an appendectomy, and set up the Tucker Aviation Corporation in Ypsilanti, Michigan, to develop it. Along with designer Wesley Casson (and, according to some sources, Miller himself), Tucker specified a car with a 175hp, 478-cu.in. Packard V-12 driving the rear wheels and an innovative all-welded 9/16-inch armor plate system that reduced the car’s overall weight to a mere 10,750 pounds, or at least a couple thousand pounds lighter than contemporary armored car designs. It rode a 109-inch wheelbase, incorporated only one door at the rear of the car, and included a pair of .30-caliber machine guns protruding diagonally from each A-pillar, a .50-caliber machine gun pointed straight out from the windshield, and perhaps the Tucker’s most revolutionary innovation, a 37mm machine gun in the power-operated dome that rotated 360 degrees and elevated as much as 75 degrees. All glass was bulletproof, and Tucker claimed that it could be fitted with dual rear wheels, four-wheel drive, and even tracks.

After working out a deal with the American Armament Company to build the armored car in its Rahway, New Jersey, factory, Tucker apparently first called up the Dutch army, though that deal fell through when Germany invaded the Netherlands in May 1940. Tucker then turned to the U.S. Army, for which Tucker produced the below video – likely shot at the Colt firearms testing range in Connecticut – extolling its virtues, including directional headlamps and an armored underside that channeled explosive forces outward, something that our modern armed forces have only really implemented in the last decade to protect soldiers against improvised explosive devices in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As for the combat car’s speed, Tucker claimed in excess of 100 MPH in the video, but other sources claimed as much as 114 MPH, 115 MPH, and 117 MPH. As Pearson wrote, the U.S. Army passed on the combat car because it was too fast, but according to Crismon, the Army only credited it for 74 MPH. Still, the Army did see something worthwhile in Tucker’s combat car – the powered turret – and contracted with Tucker to build the turrets for both boats and bombers. According to Pearson, the government then confiscated Tucker’s patents and royalty rights for the turrets during the war, leading Tucker to file a number of lawsuits over the turret rights and royalties after the war ended.

How many Tucker combat cars were built is unclear. All the photos that exist of the combat car - as well as the video – depict a prototype wearing the same license plate. However, the end of the video shows “a fleet of combat cars” lined up outside the Rahway plant. Suspiciously, they all wear the exact same camouflage pattern. Also suspiciously, none of that “fleet” – to our knowledge – still exist today. Given the publicity surrounding the Tucker 48 and the seven-figure price tags attached to those cars today, it’s a good bet that if any Tucker combat car(s) had survived all these years, it would have surfaced by now.